Tuesday, February 25, 2014

“In a
free society, counter-espionage is based on the practice most useful for
hunting rabbits. Rather than look for the rabbit, one posts oneself in a spot
where the rabbit is likely to pass." - Alexander Hamilton (as attributed by
Allen Dulles)

The lead
Humvee in the convoy suddenly comes to a halt as it slips under a tree on the
edge of town, an empty tin can, hanging from a branch by a thread, dangles in
the breeze.

To the
untrained eye it is an empty tin can hanging from a tree, but to the trained
eye it’s a sure sign of danger – a makeshift wind gauge, a sniper’s wind gauge,
indicating a Level 2 or Level 3 sniper is operating in the area and they were
about to enter the sniper’s kill zone.

When
Uncle Sam contacted me for a special mission recently, I answered the call and
spent a few weeks in the field helping to train American soldiers, including
expert snipers, from whom I learned some things that can be applied to a better
understanding of the mechanics of what happened at Dealey Plaza on November 22,
1963.

Before
trying to figure out who the Sixth Floor Sniper was and why he did the things
he did, a few things must be understood about the nature of the sniper
profession.

Not a
new idea, the historical development of the sniper as a key surgeon in the
course of battle has only been perfected in the last half of the twentieth
century.

During
the Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Brandywine, near Philadelphia, a
British sniper had General George Washington in his sights, but decided not to
shoot him in the back as he thought it ungentlemanly to do so, thus sparing the life of the
man who would be the first president of the American republic.

At
Saratoga, a few months later, an American sniper with a Kentucky long rifle
shot and killed a British general, decisively altering the outcome of not only
that battle but the war.

On
eighteen and nineteenth century war ships, the marines were issued long barrel
rifles and placed in high mast nests from where they would shoot select targets
during battles, so friendly forces were forced to wear identifying marks on
their hats so not to be accidentally hit by the marine marksmen.

As European
gunsmiths refined the rifle and ammo, the abilities of marksmen increased,
though applying the weapon for assassination purposes didn’t become
effective until World War II, and increased steadily through the Korean War and Vietnam, when the sniper came
into his own.

Snipers
played pivotal roles on the Russian front during World War II, and refined
their abilities in Korea, but it wasn’t until Vietnam (1965-1973) when the
Level One sniper came into his own, especially recruited, trained, equipped and
sent into the field on specific missions.

Traditionally snipers have been measured by the ultimate
yardstick – confirmed kills, as well as the longest shot, most difficult shot
and high target value.

As for confirmed kills, there is Simo Hayha on top,
and no one else really close. Although relatively unknown outside of his native
Finnland, where he is a national hero, you can thank Hayha for popularizing the
Olympic sport that combines cross country skiing and accurate shooting, as
that’s the way he attacked and killed over seven hundred invading Russians in
1939.

A lone wolf with no military chain of command, Hayha
used his intimate knowledge of the terrain to attack and evade the Soviets, who
kept track and confirmed his kills and sent Level 1 sniper teams and eventually
a hole brigade to stop him.

Following Hayha, there’s a Fyodor Okhlopkova, a World
War II Russian sniper with 423 kills, and Francis Pegahmagabow, a Canadian
native American Indian scout and sniper credited with 378 kills during World
War I.

A World War II German, Matthaus Hetzenauer comes in
at number four with 345 kills, while his Russian front antagonists Lyudmila
Pavlichenko (309 kills) a women, is fifth on the all time snipers list.

Vasikly Zaytsev, who shared Lee Harvey Oswald's nickname – “the Rabbit,” (242 kills) is
sixth, and probably one of the best known snipers thanks to the movie “Enemy at
the Gate,” which depicted the personal battle between the best German and
Russian snipers during World War II. Zaytsev went on to instruct snipers at a special school he established and his students were known as "little rabbits" and accounted for another 3,000 confirmed kills.

The Americans don’t rank until number 8 with Chris
Kyle, a US Navy SEAL whose 160 confirmed kills during the Iraq war just outrank
Australian Billy Sing, whose 150 kills during World War I and American Adelbert
F. Waldron II, whose 109 kills in Vietnam round out the top ten snipers of all
time.

Two other American Marines deserve notice however,
as Chuck Mawhinney (103 kills) and Carlos Hathcock (93 kills) in Vietnam are
almost celebrities, as the USMC has an award named after Hathcock, while
Mawhinney is known for being humble about his achievements, as not even his
wife, family or friends knew of his Vietnam exploits until they were revealed
in a book over twenty years later.

Top Twelve Snipers of All Time - Based on Confirmed Kills

1-Simo
Hayha – 705 kills (505 w/ rifle) Finnland 1939 WWII

2-Fyodor
Okhlopkov – 423 kills – Russian WWII

3-Francis
Pegahmagabow – 378 kills - Canadian WWI

4-Matthaus
Hetzenauer – 345 kills – German WWII

5-Lyudmila
Pavlichenko – 309 kills - Ukraine WWII

6-Vasikly
Zaytsev – the rabbit - German 242 kills WWII

7-Zhang
TYaofang – 214 kills Chinese - Korea

8-Chris
Kyle – 160 kills – US Navy SEAL – Iraq War

9-Billy
Sing – 150 + Australian during WWI

10-Adelbert F. Waldron III – 109
kills US Navy/Army 1968 Vietnam

11-Chuck Mawhinney – 103 kills USMC
1968

12-Carlos Hathcock – 93 kills USMC
1968

Longest
Shot

As for
the longest shot, the long standing record once held by Canadian Corporal Rob
Furlong – 2,430 meter (1.51 miles) was recently eclipsed by Craig Harrison, of
the Royal Marines at 2,475 meters.

Carlos
Hathcock is said to have taken the most difficult shot ever, killing an enemy
sniper by shooting him through his scope as he was aiming at Hathcock. Waldron
once shot an enemy sniper in a tree from a moving boat, and an American in Iraq made a successful shot through a brick
wall.

According to the snipers, Oswald is a Level Three sniper who is officially credited with making the most difficult shot of all time at the highest priority target, and that's why they don't believe it.

Before the Dealey Plaza analysis begins however, for starters, you must understand that there are three categories of snipers. From the Sniper’s Manual (Based on the Canadian Army TTP – Training, Techniques and Procedures.

Level
One – the Specially Trained Sniper

The most
dangerous sniper is the one who is individually selected, trained and equipped
with an accurate sniper rifle outfitted with a modern scope, night vision
device and thermal imager, an expert trained to select key personnel as their
target and can hit the bull’s eye accurately at great ranges (1,000+ meters).

These
snipers are accompanied by a spotter-security aide and are skilled in avoiding
detection. This sniper is the most difficult to effectively counter.

The
Level One sniper doesn't take multiple shots at a target when one shot is all
that’s needed. As they say, “One shot one kill,” is their motto.

This
level sniper is portrayed in the Hollywood movie “The Shooter," which
exemplifies the training, discipline, pride and professionalism exhibited by
expert snipers at this level.

Level
Two Snipers

Level
Two Snipers are trained marksmen, often found in the national armies
of the world and commonly utilized in urban combat, equipped with a standard
issue weapon and with fair to good field craft skills, he is difficult to
detect. May be deployed alone or in teams, with women snipers effective against
the Nazis on the Russian front during World War II.

The
Level Three Sniper

The
Level Three sniper is the armed irregular, with little or no formal military
training, who may or may not wear a distinguishing uniform, and may or may not
carry his weapon openly. He will go to great lengths to avoid identification as
a sniper.

The 6.5 mm Manlicher Carcano with cheap Japanese scope and custom US Air Force holster sling (Where did Oswald get the sling?) The gunsmith at Klines Sporting Goods in Chicago who mounted the scope on the rifle recently came out and acknowledged that Oswald got "very, very lucky," if in fact he used that gun to kill Kennedy.[ http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=226036]

The
Sixth Floor Sniper, whether it was Lee Harvey Oswald or someone else, would be
classified a Level Three Sniper by his weapon – the Mannlicher Carcano, a
standard issue Italian weapon, and if Oswald, by his limited US Marine Corps
training.

Winchester Model 70 - Circa 1963

As
explained to me, a Level One sniper wouldn’t use that weapon and wouldn’t need
or take more than one shot. In 1963, a Level One sniper would probably use a
state of the art custom weapon and scope, or a prized Winchester Model 70 [http://en.wikipedia.og/wiki/Winchester_Model_70][or Remington Model 700 rifle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700], top of the line models.

Remington Model 700 - Circa 1963

Since the weapon and MO – modus operandi – identifies the Sixth Floor Sniper as a
Level Three Sniper, Level One snipers say the Sixth Floor Sniper probably
didn’t take the fatal head shot that killed President Kennedy.

There
are also indications that the bullet that struck JFK in the head was a
different type of bullet than those fired from the Mannlicher Carcano, and that
shot was probably taken by a Level One sniper with a different style of weapon,
different type of bullet from a different location.

From the
Sixth Floor sniper’s nest, the best shot was when the target was approaching
the window on Houston Street, as it slowed down for the turn onto Elm Street,
and from then on the shots get harder, as the target moves from left to right
on a downward slope and interference by a tree.

The U.S.
Army Sniper’s Manual says under Engaging Moving Targets that: “Engaging moving
targets not only requires the Sniper to determine the target distance and wind
effects on the round, but must also consider the lateral and speed angle of the
target, the rounds time of flight, and the placement of a proper level to
compensate for both. These added variables increase the chance of a miss.
Therefore, the Sniper should engage a moving target when it is the only
option.” [www.cybersniper.com]

Of
course familiarity with the weapon and practice shooting at moving targets
increases the ability and skill of the shooter, but if Oswald was the Sixth
Floor Sniper there is no indication that he ever shot that rifle before, didn’t
practice or even purchase ammo for it.

As Lee
Harvey Oswald’s brother Robert, who was familiar with his shooting abilities
said, “If Lee did not spend a considerable amount of time practicing with that
rifle in the weeks and months before the assassination, then I would say that
Lee did not fire the shots that killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor
Connally.” (p. 208, “Lee – A Portrait of
Lee Harvey Oswald by his Brother, Coward-McCann, Inc., NY, 1967)

For the
Fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, the gunsmith at Kline’s in Chicago
who placed the scope on Oswald’s rifle was interviewed and quoted in a news
article saying that if Oswald used that rifle and scope he was “very lucky,”
and the snipers agree.

All of
the snipers agree that whoever fired those shots with that rifle from the Sixth
Floor window he did not use the scope, which was not properly aligned and not
necessary at that distance, where the manual sight would be sufficient.

While
the Sixth Floor sniper didn’t take the best shot from that location, as the
nearly stationary target came towards him, the head shot was most probably
taken by a Level One Sniper from either in front or behind so there was no
lateral movement as the target came towards or was going away from him.

From
what the Level One snipers tell me, the purpose of the Sixth Floor Sniper was
to provide diversion and deception, put ballistic evidence incriminating Oswald
into the car while the Level One sniper did what such snipers are trained to do
– kill the high priority target (HPT) with one shot.

They say
the Sixth Floor Sniper, whoever he was, was a Level Three sniper and his
standard issue weapon, while capable of firing three shots in the allotted time
and get out of three hits on target, was incapable of taking the fatal head
shot from that position with that weapon. Not a “lucky” shot, it couldn’t
happen. So there must have been a Level One sniper who took the fatal head shot
from another location, using a different type of weapon and ammo, and stationed
in front of or behind the target.

Integral
aspects of the Level One sniper attack, the diversion and deception not only
ensures the escape of the sniper and his spotter, but also protects the actual
sponsors, as one of the reasons for using a sniper to commit an assassination is
permit the escape of the shooter and to protect the sponsor.

The diversion
and deception were needed because there would be limited suspects if a Level
One sniper killed the President with only one shot, incriminating those few
military and intelligence agencies capable of putting a Level One sniper in the
field and taking out the highest priority target in the world without getting caught.
The Level Three sniper firing openly at the same time diverted attention from
the Level One sniper, expanded the suspect pool in general and incriminated
Oswald in particular.

In the
Marines Oswald’s nickname was “Ozzie Rabbit,” which they said was based on a
cartoon character popular at that time, and like Alice goes Through the Looking
Glass and into the Rabbit’s Hole to begin her adventure, those who devised the
Dealey Plaza operation incorporated Oswald, not as the real assassin or the Sixth
Floor sniper, but as the patsy and rabbit that would be set loose to set a
false trail and keep the official investigators from the real perpetrators of
the crime.

In his
book, “A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza,”
Craig Roberts concurs saying, “I analyzed the scene as a sniper,….(and
concluded)…it would take a minimum of two people shooting. There was little
hope that I alone, even if equipped with precision equipment, would be able to
duplicate the feat described by the Warren Commission,” so neither could Lee
Harvey Oswald, or any Level Three sniper.

“I would
have never put anyone in the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) with so many
locations that were much more advantageous,” Roberts said, “unless I needed a
diversion. If I did, it would be a good place for red herrings to be observed
by witnesses.”

As seen
from the street below, the Sixth Floor Sniper, according to all witnesses who
saw him, wore a white shirt (Oswald wore brown), and according to one witness
(Amos Eunis) who got a clear view of him, the sniper in the window had a very
distinctive bald spot on the top of his head, not a physical characteristic
shared by Oswald. Like Oswald, the Sixth Floor Sniper probably had good reason
to be there, possibly worked in the building or as a subcontractor or delivery
person familiar with the area, one who it wouldn’t seem suspicious for other
employees to see him there.

Nor did
he leave immediately, as the Warren Commission Report has Oswald running down
four flights of stairs to get to the Second Floor lunchroom in time to be seen
there by Dallas Police officer Marion Baker ninety seconds after the last shot.
The Sixth Floor Sniper took his time, did not run, and instead, as the photo evidence proves, he moved boxes
around, putting one on the window sill that was mistakenly believed to have
been used as a gun rest. He was still in the window nearly four to five minutes
after the shooting when seen by a secretary from across the street. If not a
TSBD employee or contractor, the Sixth Floor Sniper was possibly a police or
sheriff’s officer who just stayed nearby and blended in with the other
investigators when they began a search of the building.

The sniper’s
analysis is that the Sixth Floor, Level Three sniper’s job was to divert and deceive,
not to kill, and he did not take the fatal head shot, which was probably taken
by a Level One sniper from a location in front of or behind the target, with a different
style weapon and type of bullet, one that shattered on impact.

This
sniper’s analysis is supported by the 1998 report by U.S. Attorney John Orr
that indicates the bullet that hit JFK in the head was a different type of
bullet than CE399 and other bullets fired from the Mannlicher Carcano rifle
found in the TSBD. Orr’s important report convinced the Department of Justice,
the FBI, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and
Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to conduct further tests of CE567,
bullet fragments from the limo, no mean feat.[

Like the
snipers, when a veteran deer hunter visited Dealey Plaza he was immediately
drawn to the area behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll and said that’s
where he would set up his deer stand.

But a
Level One sniper could take that fatal head shot from hundreds of yards away,
tucked back in a room away from the window so that no one could see him. Level
One snipers are the most difficult to detect and to counter.

According
to the Canadian Army Sniper Manual, the best way to stop a sniper is for
another sniper to kill him. The manual says: “The best way to stop the sniper
is to kill the sniper. Let them escape and they will attack someone else,
somewhere else.”

Counter-snipers
are instructed to “Have a plan and rehears it. Do Not fixate on casualties!
Kill the sniper, then attend to casualties.”

When
under fire the response policy is to keep moving, get out of the Kill Zone as
quickly as possible and move in a swerving S or Z pattern, identify the
sniper’s location, return fire, maneuver, attack and kill them. “Do not fixate
on casualties, kill the sniper!”

Although
Will Greer, the Secret Service driver was trained in these same procedures he
inexplicably slowed down after the first shot and came to almost a complete
stop precisely at the moment the head shot was taken. A Protestant Irishman
from Northern Ireland, Agent Greer was an Orangeman who belonged to the secret
order that fought the IRA and worked closely with the British MI5 and MI6
intelligence agencies.

Ian
Fleming, in the short story “The Living
Daylights,” has 007 assigned to kill a sniper expected to try to shoot a
defector running across the no-man’s land at the Berlin Wall, and James Bond is
surprised to see through his scope a beautiful women sniper, and he is
reprimanded when he only wounds and doesn’t kill her.

The
President’s security sometimes included counter-sniper snipers. Such
precautions were taken a few weeks before Dallas when the President visited
Tampa and traveled through the city in a similar motorcade, and over a dozen
Tampa Sheriff’s deputies were deployed with rifles on roofs along the motorcade
route. But no such precautions were taken in Dallas.

It has
been alleged (by Penn Jones), that Dallas Deputy Sheriff Weatherford was on the
Records Building roof overlooking Dealey Plaza with a rifle at the time of the
assassination, and there are published reports he returned fire. But
Weatherford’s official statement reflects that he was on the Houston Street
sidewalk with other deputies. Weatherford said that he was with Deputy Allan
Sweatt, whose statement confirms Weatherford’s story that they ran to the
Grassy Knoll before entering the back of the TSBD and searched the building.

Weatherford
assisted in the search of the sixth floor that discovered the shells and the
rifle, but failed to find Oswald’s clipboard, and he also participated in the
search of the Paine’s house and garage when the backyard photos were found
depicting Oswald holding the murder weapons and communist publications, which was part of the cover-story, a failed black propaganda operation that attempted to blame the assassination on Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro with sniper rifle

Just as
the dangling tin can was sign indicating there was a sniper operating in the
area, there were similar signs of danger before JFK entered Dealey Plaza, but
they went unheeded or were intentionally ignored.

Of the
Dealey Plaza danger signs, a few stand out, especially those who expressed
foreknowledge of the assassination, the Walker shooting, the recorded Alpha 66
threat, the Stevenson incident and Umbrella Man.

While
each of these danger signs should be reviewed in depth, the Umbrella Man was right
there at Dealey Plaza, and he admits that his umbrella was intended to be a
sign – a silent protest, a signal and message that President Kennedy would
recognize and understand – a sign that referred to his father’s isolationist
stand at the beginning of World War II, the image of Chamberlain’s umbrella at Munich that represented the failed policy of “appeasement” with the Nazis, which the
Umbrella Man implied was JFK’s policy towards communists. Louie
Steven Witt, a Dallas insurance office worker who claimed to be the Umbrella
Man, told the HSCA that the umbrella was a visual protest of JFK’s father’s
policies of appeasement of Hitler at Munich when he was ambassador to the UK
(1938-39), with the umbrella being a reference to Nevelle Chamberlain. Witt
told the HSCA that it was someone in his insurance office - the Rio Grande
National Insurance Co., told him that the Kennedys were sore about the
umbrella being used as protest sign. “I was going to use the umbrella to heckle
the president’s motorcade….I just knew it was a sore sport with the Kennedys. I
just knew the vague generalities of it. It had something to do with something
that happened years ago with the father Joe Kennedy when he was the Ambassador
to England.”

The Umbrella Man at Dealey Plaza

Who
planted the seed in Witt’s mind to heckle the president? Perhaps it was someone
who also shared an office in the Rio Grande building, - which included the
Secret Service, Army Intelligence and the Emigration and Naturalization
Service, where Oswald visited numerous times. Witt’s references to
Chamberlain’s umbrella and appeasement at Munich are echoed exactly by General
LeMay at the White House a year earlier.

Chamberlain - Appeasement at Munich

At the
height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 19, 1962, President Kennedy met
in the Oval Office with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Air Force Chief Gen.
Curtis LeMay was recorded as saying, “…I don’t see any other solution for it
[other than direct military action].….This is almost as bad as the appeasement
at Munich.(Pause)...” Sheldon Stern: “The general had gone well
beyond merely giving advice or even disagreeing with his Commander-in-chief. He
had taken his generation’s ultimate metaphor for shortsightedness and
cowardice, the 1938 appeasement of Hitler at Munich, and flung it in the
President’s face. President Kennedy, in a remarkable display of sang froid,
refused to take the bait; he said absolutely nothing.”

A few
minutes later JFK did reply to LeMay’s remark that, “…In other words, you’re in
a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

“What
did you say?” Kennedy asked.

“You’re
in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay repeated. And in a response that the Miller
Center’s transcriptionists got wrong, JFK told LeMay that, “You’re in it with
me.”

And the
pretty bad fix that JFK and LeMay were in together then was not about Munich
but Cuba.

Then, as
JFK entered Dealey Plaza and the sniper’s Kill Zone, the Umbrella Man's sign
may have been the last thing Kennedy saw before his head was shattered by a
bullet fired by a Level One sniper who was not Lee Harvey Oswald.

Monday, February 24, 2014

One of
my father’s law enforcement text books advises that in the case of elimination murders
and political assassinations the key to the crime rests not with the triggerman
but with the victim – and who wanted him eliminated, and advises to check the last item he was working on which might
provide a clue.

The last thing JFK left on is desk before he left the White House for Texas were
the reports on the discovery of an arms cache on a Venezuelan beach that if traced
to Cuba could provide enough evidence of Castro’s intention to export his revolution
to all South America and convince the OAS to issue economic sanctions against
Cuba.

Kennedy
went to his grave knowing of the report, but unaware, as we are today, that the
Venezuelan arms cache was probably planted by the CIA as part of a black
propaganda operation to get the OAS to move against Cuba, which it did.

I wrote
about the Venezuelan arms cache and its possible connection to the assassination
of President Kennedy in a JFKCountercoup blogpost - http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/04/venezuelan-arms-cache-northwoods.html, which is more detailed and footnoted and sparked an email from someone
who claims to be a relative of the CIA research analyst who documented the arms
cache and wrote the reports that were presented to JFK late on the night he
left for Texas. This relative said that he does not have the research report,
but he was thinking on filing an FOIA request to obtain it (and maybe some
interested attorney can come forward and give him assistance).

The best
account of the Venezuelan arms cache is Joe Smith’s version, which mentions the
contribution of the women CIA analyst who in his
autobiography “Portrait of a Cold
Warrior” (Ballantine, NY, 1976), in which he quotes an associate saying, "Our intelligence assistant on the Venezuelan desk got the material out again right after we found the arms and she came up with a beautiful research job," To put things in their proper perspective, Joseph Burkholder Smith wrote:

Between the Argentine elections in 1963 and
the Chilean election of 1964, my attention was once again focused on Cuba. Gerry
Droller had become branch chief of the countries of the “Cono Sur,” the
southern cone of Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Chile. He came down to
Buenos Aires to remind us Cuba was more important than any of them.

“Listen,
this guy Des is a genius and he’s got the side track to the White House,” Gerry
explained. “I also think J.C.’s going to retire soon and Des will run the whole
division in name as well as fact. Already we got dozens of old FE hands in the
division and more guys from Germany too. WH Division is now all chopstick users
and umlaut speakers. And we’re all supposed to concentrate on Cuba.”

The
matter we all concentrated on from December 1963, until the summer of 1964 was
making the discovery of a small arms cache on the coast of Venezuela seem
important enough proof of Castro’s interventionists intentions that the OAS
would declare Cuba an outlaw nation and refuse to allow OAS members to have
political or economic relations with her. I initially paid little attention to
the news of the news of the discovery of these arms that came from Caracas just
after John Kennedy’s assassination. I still hadn’t gotten over the terrible
shock of the President’s death when I received a cable saying headquarters
wanted maximum press coverage given to the announcement on December 3, 1963,
that the OAS had agreed to investigate Venezuelan charges the arms had been
secretly delivered by Castro’s forces for the use of Venezuelan leftist
guerrillas.

SIDE
wasn’t interested in getting such a story all out coverage. The attitude of
SIDE officers was “what else is new?”….

The new
chief of covert action operations for WH (Western Hemisphere) came down to
Buenos Aires just before Christmas to explain how important the Venezuelan arms
cache discovery was considered. Dramatically, he related how much the discovery
had meant to John Kennedy. “The
President had been pressuring us for months before he was killed to come up
with some solid proof that Castro was exporting his revolution. He wanted to
make his anti-Castro crusade a Latin American cause not just a U.S. mission. He
wanted to have some really convincing evidence of Castro’s interference in the
affairs of Latin countries that we could get the OAS (Organization of American
States) to take collective action against Castro. This discovery is what he was
looking for.”

Herb
explained that the news of the discovery had come in from Caracas just the day
before President Kennedy left for Texas. He and another officer rushed over to
see Bobby Kennedy with the cable. Bobby called the President and he ordered
them to come immediately to the oval office. “President Kennedy was extremely
pleased and excited about the prospects,” Herb said. “It was very late in the
evening when we left the White House. I think this was the last piece of
business he took up before he left Washington. We all like to think we’re
running the operation for him.”

Herb
presented us the case against Cuba. The arms had been found on a remote
peninsula served only by one secondary road and with no large settlements
nearby. Local fishermen had discovered the cache by accident. No Venezuelan
guerrillas ever had come near the spot. Herb’s story was that on such a coast a
boat could land at night with little chance of being detected, the stuff
stashed in the dunes, and picked up by
some subsequent night by the revolutionaries receiving Castro’s
assistance.

We were
working very, Herb said, with the Venezuelan authorities to establish complete
proof the arms had come from Castro and investigations were going on in Europe
and Canada. Some of the arms had been traced to a Belgian manufacturer and
Belgian security officials were helping us find the records that would show
when they were purchased by the Cubans. The Canadians had already
advantageously found proof that a sixteen-foot aluminum boat found hidden with
the arms had been sold by a Canadian firm to the Cuban Agrarian Reform
Institute just one month before the arms were discovered.

He was
most excited about a story from a Venezuelan leftist in the custody of the
Venezuelan security police. The prisoner confessed that maps found in his
apartment showed where attacks were to be made in Caracas, using these arms, on
the eve of December 1, 1963, presidential elections. Also found in his
apartment were instructions on how to use the arms found in the cache. They
were a type of weapon which hitherto had not been used by any Venezuelan
groups.

The story
of the maps sounded familiar to me. I couldn’t remember anything about arms
instructions, but I remembered the maps were found in this man’s apartment way
back when I had been Venezuelan desk chief.

“Aren’t
these the maps we found the other year and couldn’t make any sense of?” I
asked.

“Yes,
that’s right,” Herb replied. “Our intelligence assistant on the Venezuelan desk
got the material out again right after we found the arms and she came up with a
beautiful Herb replied. “Our intelligence assistant on the Venezuelan desk got
the material out again right after we found the arms and she came up with a
beautiful research job we sent to Caracas for the police to use in questioning
the suspects. He’s confessed.”

I was
not too impressed with this evidence of the Venezuelan guerrillas” intended use
of the arms. It sounded to me as though we might have manufactured it to meet
President Kennedy’s requirement for an OAS case. I was especially unimpressed
by the confession. There are few prisoners of security police in Latin America
who refuse to confess. If they don’t confess they usually have died in the
process of making up their minds, having thought too long about the matter with
their heads under water or something.

“I like
the touch about the boat’s being sold by Canadians to the Cuban Agrarian Reform
Institute. Makes it sound as though Castro’s trying to be real spooky, using a
cover like the Agrarian Reform Institute to
deliver arms.” I couldn’t resist saying, “How did we actually get the arms
there?”

Herb
looked at me very hard. “Joe, you are too fond of black operations. Of course,
we didn’t put the arms there ourselves. Come on.”

We had
three things to do: first show all the evidence to SIDE (Venezuelan Secret
Police) and get SIDE to push the matter up to the top of the Argentine government
to gain Argentine’s support for Venezuelan’s charges in the OAS; get the
pictures in the Argentine press, plus editorial and other comments supporting
the Venezuelan case; try to uncover anything similar we could to show that the
Cubans were giving direct support to revolutionaries in Argentina. The first
two tasks were easily accomplished. My friends in Action Propaganda particularly
liked the picture of the arms. We had no luck for some months in finding any
Argentine guerrillas.

In early
March, 1964, we got a break. The Argentine gendarmerie, the border police,
found eight young people in a camp in the far northern province of Salta near
the Bolivian border. Seven men and a girl were picked up. They had some
weapons, copy of Che Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare, and a stack of
Communist propaganda tracts. My SIDE friends suggested we all take the
Beachcraft to Salta to see whether or not this might be the evidence of Cuban
support to guerrillas we were looking for.

We went to
the gendarmerie post a few miles outside the provincial capital where the
prisoners were being held and their confiscated arms and possessions were
stored. The arms were clearly old Argentine army rifles. The Communist propaganda was similar to that
which could be obtained under the counter at bookshops near the University of
Buenos Aires. The public sale of such literature was prohibited, but Captain
Lynch’s men were picking it up all the time and I had seen before most of what
I saw in Salta. Lynch had also given me a copy of his nephew’s book, also easily,
if not legally obtainable. I sat quietly in the back of the room, posing as
another “European “ Argentine, while the SIDE officers talked to several
prisoners. They were middle-class kids and were awaiting the arrival of a
lawyer one of their fathers had arranged for them. They were polite but not
communicative. The SIDE officers tried no persuasion.

A week
after my visit to the camp, Des Fitzgerald came to Buenos Aires. As Gerry
Droller had predicted, Des was now WH Division chief and this was his first
swing around the hemisphere to visit his new station. He gave us all a short
pep talk – the theme of which was the importance of the OAS sanctions operation.
He also briefed us on the overall status of other operations against Cuba being
run from JM/WAVE, but he sounded a bit discouraged.

“If Jack
Kennedy had lived,” Des said, “I can assure you we would have gotten rid of
Castro by last Christmas. Unfortunately the new President isn’t as gung-ho on
fighting Castro as Kennedy was.”

“What do
you mean by ‘getten rid of,’ Des?” I asked.

“Assassination?”

“Well,
you know, Joe, we don’t use that language,” he replied. “Just say I mean he
wouldn’t still be doing business in Havana.”

Des asked
me what I thought about the guerrillas in Salta. I told him I didn’t think
there was a shred of evidence that they were receiving any support from Castro.
“They’re just a bunch of bored middle-class kids, Des, who maybe had a fight
with their parents.”

I didn’t
know that unhappy middle-class kids would soon be throwing bombs all over the
world, from Montevideo to New York, Paris to Tokyo, and almost everywhere in
between. These kids would help drive Lyndon Johnson from office, but not before
he had ordered CIA to violate their charter and get busy trying to stop dissent
in the United States. They would push Richard Nixon’s paranoia to the point
where he couldn’t rest until he had expanded Johnson’s covert operations against
them so that fighting kids was a top priority of Mexico City station when I got
there in 1969.

“Well,”
mused Des, “maybe we have enough friends in Argentina that somebody important
might just say he thought Castro was helping them.”

General
Julio Alsogaray, commander in chief of the gendarmerie, declared on March 26,
1964, that there were at least twenty guerrillas in Salta and adjacent Jujuy
province and that some of them had fired on his troops. Two guerrillas were
killed trying to cross the border into Bolivia in the encounter. “There
guerrillas,” said Alsogaray, “are being aided by Fidel Castro, who is trying to
export revolution to all of the continent."

The OAS
convened a meeting of foreign ministers in Washington from July 21 to July 26,
1964 to decide on Venezuela’s’ charges. They concluded that Castro had sent
arms to Venezuela for the purpose of disrupting the Venezuelan elections of
December, 1963. Diplomats and consular relations with Cuba were severed by OAS
members and economic sanctions enforced. Only Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and
Mexico opposed these measures. The rest of Latin America evidently had been
convinced of the validity of the Venezuelan charges and the threat of Cuban
subversion in the hemisphere.”

[Kelly
Notes: Can anyone come up with a photo of the Venezuelan arms cache that is mentioned? The delivery of arms caches to rebels is the MO – modus operandi of the
CIA’s JM/WAVE maritime team who were caught doing this very thing – dropping off arms caches on Cuban beaches - including the raid
that made the November 1, 1963 New York Times. Also note that the Argentine
Navy Captain Lynch mentioned is the uncle of Che Guevara Lynch. Can anyone
identify Joe Smith’s CIA associate “Herb”? Our Canadian and Belgian friends could also check to see if those leads panned out or if there is any official government records of this investigation. Also recall that "Maurice Bishop" used a Belgian passport and was affiliated with a Belgian company. I would venture a modest bet
that the inventory of this Venezuelan arms cache, that was compiled by this
women CIA analyst and we should be able to obtain via FOIA, will include Manlicher-Carcano
rifles and 6.5 ammo similar to that used in the Dealey Plaza Operation. Any
takers?]

Monday, February 17, 2014

In response to a request for the evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK, I suggest the relevant chapter in Tony Summers' "Not In Your Lifetime" and Howard Roffman's "Presumed Guilty," which is available on-line at Dave Ratcliff's ratical.org/JFK or referenced in my "Doors of Perception" JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com blogpost of July 9, 2013, which details how Oswald could not have been on the Sixth Floor at the time of the shooting and therefore could not have been the Sixth Floor Sniper.

That is not to say that Oswald is innocent of everything, as he might have taken a shot at General Walker and killed Tippit, but the preponderance of evidence indicates that Oswald was not on the Sixth Floor at the time of the assassination and was not the Sixth Floor Sniper.

More than one witness places Oswald on the first floor by the telephone (Shelley) around noon, and in the lunchroom reading a newspaper (Givins, Arnold) around 12:15, when two witnesses outside saw a man with a rifle on the sixth floor with another man in a sports coat. A prisoner from across the street also saw a man in the window fiddling with the scope of a rifle with another man at this time. If Oswald was on the first floor at 12:15, who was the man in the sixth floor with the rifle with another man in a sports coat?

A TSBD secretary told Robert Groden that she was on the second floor handing Oswald change when they heard the shooting.

Less than two minutes later Dallas Police officer Marion Baker saw Oswald through the window of the second floor lunchroom door. Since the door had to be closed for Baker to see him through the window, Oswald must have been walking from the secretary's office on the second floor through the vestibule where Baker saw him through the window on his way to the lunchroom to buy a coke with the change he obtained from the secretary.

If Oswald had entered the lunchroom through the door with the window through which Baker saw Oswald, then Roy Truly the TSBD superintendent would have seen Oswald go through the door because he was a few steps ahead of Baker, and he didn't see Oswald go through that door, as he would if he did.

Had Oswald come down those steps as he would have to if he was the Sixth Floor Sniper, then he would have been on the steps at the same time as two secretaries, and would have passed two employees on the step landings on the fifth and fourth floors, but he didn't.

In addition, those eyewitnesses on the street who eyeballed the Sixth Floor Sniper all agreed he had on a white shirt (Oswald wore brown) and one witness clearly stated that the sniper had a very distinctive bald spot on the top of his head, a unique, distinguishing attribute not shared by Oswald.

Then, five minutes after the last shot, a court clerk from across the street saw a man in the Sixth Floor sniper's window, when Oswald was on the first floor. If not Oswald, who was that person if not the sniper?

Since Oswald could not be placed on the sixth floor within a half hour of the shooting before hand and was on the second floor ninety seconds later, and didn't come down the steps or go through the lunchroom door he would have had to go through if he was the sniper, then after eliminating the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes used to say, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.

Therefore, if Oswald was not on the Sixth Floor at the time of the shooting, didn't run down those stairs past the four witnesses who didn't see him, didn't run though the second floor lunchroom door as Truly didn't see him and was on his way to buy a coke when Baker saw him through the closed lunchroom door window, then he could not possibly have been the Sixth Floor Sniper.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

They correctly classify the 50 year old legally unresolved homicide of John F. Kennedy as a cold case, or one that remains open to investigation and periodically reviewed by new investigators with the latest information and scientific technology has to offer, and focus on what are strictly objective issues that can and should be agreeably resolved to a legal and scientific certainty.

That just hasn't happened yet, at least not as presented in this NOVA TV special that had the opportunity to do some unique and special experiments but apparently decided not to bother.

That lofty goal was belittled by a preliminary press release in which Marquette professor John McAdams promised that modern science would prove that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy alone, evidence that I was anxious to see because I thought science had already proved that Oswald could not have killed Kennedy and in the end McAdams' promise was replaced by an anonymous narrator - like the Wizard of Oz from behind the curtain proclaiming: "When it comes to the JFK assassination, there are explanations science cannot provide."

Check that: "There are explanations science cannot provide."

And what is the explanation they provide?

"No experiments can show why someone would take a rifle into a high window and pull the trigger."

No, science cannot provide a motive, but it can help identify a suspect and classify the killer and a proper investigation of the suspects background usually reveals the motive. So while scientific experiments cannot determine motive, or why "someone would take a rifle into a high window and pull the trigger," according to these NOVA guys, "they can show it probable that Lee Harvey Oswald did that and he alone killed President Kennedy"

The key word here is "probable" that experiments can show it "probable" that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, when in fact experiments have shown that it was only possible for Oswald to have been in position to have done the dirty deed, and more probable that he wasn't on the Sixth Floor at the time of the shooting and that someone else was the sniper in the high window who pulled the trigger of the gun that shot JFK.

As Jim Leher, a journalist at the scene of the crime said, "In a few seconds one guy gets off three rounds - pow, pow, pow, and changes the course of history," that is, if in fact only one guy was doing the shooting when in fact there is strong evidence of a second gunman, one who shot the president in the head, a shot that did not originate from the Sixth Floor window, details not recognized by this NOVA show.

Then professor McAdams, now that Gerald Posner has been thoroughly discraced, it is McAdams who is dragged out of his university office every time they need someone to counter silly conspiracy theories, and ensure that the show is "fair and balanced," who says: "History doesn't always make sense. Here's a nothing person, you know, who brought down the leader of the free world."

Waite a minute! History? Who said anything about history? What happened to science? I thought we were going to apply objective science to the assassination evidence and prove who killed JFK? What's with this interpretive history stuff?

McAdams can't even say their names: JFK is the "leader of the free world," while Oswald, I suppose he is referring to Oswald as the "nothing person," a nothing person who was an ex-Marine, radar and radio communication specialist who served at a high security U2 base in Japan, was trained in the Russian language, defected to the Soviet Union, returned a few years later with his Russian wife and daughter, was assisted by members of a Dallas anti-Communist Russian Orthodox Church parish that was subsidized by the CIA, worked at a graphics arts firm that placed captions and markers on U2 photos of the USSR and Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is suspected of being involved in the shooting of Gen. Walker, promoted the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans when it was a target of a CIA operation, visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City and associated closely with such CIA assets as George deMohrenschildt, Volkmar Schmidt and Ruth and Michael Paine. And he was only 24 years old.

Whatever he was, he was not crazy or mentally deranged as some have made him out to be, and most certainly was not a "nobody person," but Oswald fit the COPP - Cover Operational Personality Profile. So even if modern science can prove that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed President Kennedy, the assassin's personality profile clearly indicates that he was not a deranged loner but a covert operative run by an intelligence case officer and the assassination fits the modus operandi of a covert intelligence operation designed to shield and protect its actual sponsors.

Meet Lucien "Luke" and his son Michael Haag. These Hardy Boys are professional firearms instructors, the best in the business with BS degrees whose specialty is shooting incident reconstruction - an important part of forensic science that they wrote the book on.

Having read the FBI shooting incident reconstruction of a long Florida firefight with drug dealers in which there were a number of federal agent casualties, it is easy to understand the need to recreate the battle afterwards in order to figure out what happened and learn any lessons to prevent mistakes from being repeated.

As firearm instructors with many years experience in the field, Luke got into the business before there was any formal training or accreditation, or before such TV crime shows like CSI - Crime Scene Investigator made the profession so popular. But Haag was willing to give the producers of this show what they wanted. Luke Haag has the practical experience and folksy wisdom to say something as idiotic as: "The essence of good forensic science is to look at what are competing explanations of an event. And if you rule out that which is impossible, then what remains, however seemingly improbable, is the truth."

Stop right there! Besides plaggerizing - Poznerizing Arthur Conan Doyle, or neglecting to even credit him for that Sherlock Holmes statement, that is NOT "the essence of good forensic science."

The purpose of good forensic science is not to weight "competing explanations of an event," that's an academic forensics, like school debating teams, we are discussing forensic science, and the science part is the developing crime scene evidence that is admissible in a court of law and preserving its provenance until it can be - that is until it can be introduced into a court of law, even if that is over 50 years after the committing of the crime.

Now Luke Haag, with over 47 years in the gun and forensic science business, certainly knows all this, and his son, who grew up in the biz, was consulted in the investigation of a Taiwanese presidential assassination attempt that certainly deserves further looking into, but they certainly knew that they were directly quoting Sir Author Conan Doyle's "The Blanched Soldier" and repeated in "The Beryl Coronet," when they furnished the final quote of the show that "if you rule out that which is impossible, then what remains, however seemingly improbable, is the truth."

Logically applied, taking Holmes' dictum means that since Oswald couldn't have been on the Sixth Floor at the time of the shooting, then the shots must have been fired by someone else, and however inconvenient or improbable, someone else other than Oswald must have killed Kennedy.

Better still is Sir Doyle having Holmes remark that, "I think there are certain crimes the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge," as he is quoted as saying in "The Adventures of Charles Augustus."

Ah yes, Private Revenge, a certain title for a pulp fiction novel that can be someday applied to the Kennedy assassination and made into a major motion picture, but until then we have to stick to the scientifically objective facts and an equally instructive quote found on the Haag's web site and attributed to a New Zealand investigator - "The gun speaks....and the message of the gun is there to read by one who knows the language."

For forensic science beginners, bullets often have a unique and distinctive marks left by the barrel, fingerprints and DNA are hard evidence, small holes usually represent entrance wounds and large holes an exit wound, and the ballistic details in the Walker, Kennedy and Tippit shootings can get absorbing in detail but inconsequential in the end.

For those actually interested in an honest, objective and thorough analysis of the ballistics in these cases and attempting to reconstruct the shootings as they took place should review the work already done by others, especially Dr Cyril Wecht, Joshia Thompson, John Orr, Esq., Drs. Barger, Weiss and Ackensasy, Don Thomas and Stu Wexler and Larry Hancock.

As for NOVA's presentation, when it comes to the scientific evidence in the assassination they apparently passed on reviewing the acoustic evidence and went straight to the brain - the head shot, but they claim they had to reconstruct it because it is "impossible" to evaluate the original brain, but don't explain why.

They couldn't conduct these experiments on the real brain because it is no longer available, as parts of it were blow away and fell in parts onto the car's trunk, seat and floor, and some fell onto the floor of the Parkland emergency room, while some was scraped out of the cranium and placed into little jars labeled "JFK brain matter," and later flushed into a food processor, while what was left was reportedly buried with the President by his brother when his remains were removed and reburied in a secret late night military exercise in 1967. So much for the provenance of a key piece of the forensic evidence.

For a real forensic examination of a brain see Dr. Cyril Wecht's presentation at the October 2013 "Pass the Torch" conference at the Wecht Center for Forensic Science and Law in Pittsburgh when he actually sections a brain to show what it actually looks like, and how that would indicate the direction of the shot from where it entered.

John Orr, a federal attorney who on his own time evaluated the ballistic evidence in the assassination and concluded and convinced US Attorney General Janet Reno, as well as the administrators of the National Archives and the FBI to conduct scientific tests on ballistic evidence (CE 567), the bullet fragments found on the limo floor, which contained suspected DNA evidence that could have disproved the single bullet theory and give weight to a probable conspiracy.

Orr's report indicated that the fatal head shot that killed President Kennedy did not originate from the Sixth Floor window, but from another direction, from another rifle and a different type of bullet than those fired from the Mannlicher Carcano, as unlike CE399 - the magic bullet, the bullet that hit JFK in the head fragmented on impact.

But of course you won't learn any of this from the NOVA TV special "Cold Case," which examines competing versions of events and tries to rule out the impossible and however improbable, accept what's left as the truth of the matter, and so be it.

So far, when it comes to the assassination of President Kenned, science and law have failed to find the truth, something that apparently will take a private revenge to ascertain to a scientific certainty.